Avenged Sevenfold's latest record Life Is But A Dream might be divisive among their fanbase, but according to the Billboard 200 people seemed to be pretty into it. Life Is But A Dream debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard 200, with 36,000 album-equivalent units moved (meaning 28,000 actual sales and the rest streaming equivalents). For reference, Avenged Sevenfold's 2016 surprise album The Stage debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 with 76,000 album-equivalent units.
If you're wondering who topped the charts this week, it's all about South Korean boy band Stray Kids and their new album 5-STAR. The album launched with 249,500 equivalent album units moved, 235,000 of which were album sales. I know how much you all love Stray Kids.
As for future Avenged Sevenfold, there might not be any more full length albums. In an interview with Whiplash, Christ said Avenged Sevenfold is more interested in dropping single songs and making them big events rather than go down the traditional path anymore.
"We want this to be a full experience as an album," said Christ. "We don't know if we're gonna do a full album again, to be honest. We might do singles and eventize those later on in our career. At this moment, this is our body of work that we want everyone to get kind of at the same time and experience it from track one to track eleven. And I think that that's what has always been important to us, is the way we release things to the public. And it's not because we're hoity-toity and think we're better than other artists or anything like that. It's just we have a certain way that we communicate with our fans and have [done] for the last 20-plus years.
"And we like to keep that intact and always come up with a new, fun way of releasing it. Just like with our music — we're always challenging ourselves and trying to do new things in our music. Why stop there? Let's think about how we can do something fun in the releases and stuff like that. And I think that's really what came back to the way we released The Stage. We had this grandiose idea that we could do… It might not be accepted right away. But the cool thing was we did what we wanted to do. We dropped a surprise release, which no one had done in our genre at the time, and we got to play on the top of Capitol Records, the iconic rooftop there, and do the first-ever virtual livestream in 2016.
"And at the time I didn't even realize what that would mean. It wasn't until 2020, as we all know, and everything went crazy and everyone went to virtual livestreams that it was able to actually show a little bit more significance that it already had being on the top of Capitol Records and playing a livestream."
Catch Avenged Sevenfold at one of the dates below, and get your tickets here.
